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The Big Deal: The ‘Layton Nation’ — shiny, happy people

An upbeat, sunny tone permeated the NDP’s image in this election campaign.

Ignatieff screen grab from youtube

By Sarah BarmakSpecial to The Star

Sat., April 30, 2011

“Orange Crush,” “Layton Nation” and moustaches everywhere.

Whether or not the New Democrats translate their unprecedented surge in the polls to a surge in real votes on Monday, there will be a rush to analyze how they got as far as they did. Part of that discussion will surely be devoted to one thing, especially among political strategists: the upbeat, sunny, featherlight tone that permeated the party’s image.

The big question will be whether that cheery approach could have a lasting effect on future Canadian elections. The campaign began, after all, with a slew of negative advertising from parties that ultimately failed to attract new supporters.

There have long been countless laments about the increasingly caustic tone of political advertising, a tone that only darkened during this election. Political analysts have credited a barrage of Conservative attack ads that began long before the writ was dropped for stalling Michael Ignatieff’s attempts to appear to be a convincing choice for prime minister — an opinion shared by the frustrated Liberal leader himself in an interview with the Star’s editorial board on Wednesday.

The ads, which assailed Ignatieff’s background and painted him as an absentee Canadian who was only back in the country to fulfill a personal quest for power (“He didn’t come back for you,” one ad went; another took shots at his family), were relentless — and were eventually met with Liberal attack spots in response.

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Negative ads, many have argued, are a catch-22. They’re bad for democracy, but they’re also pretty damn good for damaging the competition. They are blamed for voter apathy and political disengagement. But they persist because 1) they work, and 2) they present a situation known as a prisoner’s dilemma — a logical impasse where the party that doesn’t resort to dirty tactics risks losing more than anyone else.

Layton didn’t entirely rise above the fray, to be sure. He did go on the attack. Most memorably, he scored points by dinging Ignatieff on his poor parliamentary attendance during the televised leaders’ debate.

The NDP’s happy image came out in different ways — in their orange “Together” campaign signs, in Layton’s smiling demeanour. Mostly, though, much of the most buoyant Dipper material has been user-generated. One viral trend saw supporters changing their Facebook profile pictures to a tangerine-coloured square with a grey moustache suspended in it. (Alternately, others changed their photos to show bottles of Orange Crush soda.) Another trend saw supporters at rallies wearing fake grey moustaches.

Layton’s moustache became a genuine election meme. Simple and sweet, it represented him, to be sure, but it also stood for a sense of lightness and humour. Although it verged on being facile, it was an antidote to the doom and gloom.

Last week, an illustrator’s playful, iconic drawings of Layton — done seemingly in his spare time — caught on. One, called “Layton Nation,” featured an orange poster with the leader’s silhouette in brown, and his trademark ’stache outlined in white. The illustrator, Ryan James Terry, posted another with a rainbow streaming from the moustache, as if it possesses magical powers.

In this, the Dippers appear to have accrued the feel-good appeal of the campaign of Barack Obama, who adopted his iconic “Hope” poster after it was made by artist Shepard Fairey. Obama was criticized for the poster’s content-free ability to represent whatever supporters wanted it to, sure. But it also helped win him the election.

If the NDP make serious inroads at the ballot box, expect this optimistic turn — and the ability to crowd-source a campaign — to figure in this week’s attempts to analyze what they did right.

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